Income inequality hasn't budged under de Blasio, report finds

Although Mayor Bill de Blasio campaigned on a promise to narrow the gap between the city’s richest and poorest, a recent report found little progress in reducing income inequality during his tenure.

The report, released today by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, found that income inequality has been largely unchanged since de Blasio took office in 2014. The report looked at the Gini coefficient—a measure of distribution—for census income data in the city. A Gini coefficient of zero represents equal income distribution; a coefficient of 1 corresponds to one person holding all the wealth. The city received a Gini coefficient score of 0.5504 in 2017, compared with a score of 0.547 in 2013.

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The income Gini coefficient for the U.S. was measured at 0.486 in 2017.

“Much has gone contrary to expectations since the beginning of the de Blasio administration,” wrote Alex Armlovich, the report's author. “The revolution that was promised during the election to end the ‘Tale of Two Cities’ never came.”

The report also found that the number of New Yorkers receiving financial assistance through programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program increased from 2014 to 2015 but has declined since then.

The report does not specifically mention the poverty rate, which fell to 19%, by the city’s measure, in 2017. That’s a level not seen since before the Great Recession in the city, but it's still above the national rate of 12.3%. A spokeswoman for the mayor argued to The Wall Street Journal­ that the report’s measures of inequality don’t move fast enough to measure the mayor’s progress in combating poverty.

“Thanks to the policies of this administration, we have improved the lives of the most vulnerable New Yorkers and are on track to move 800,000 people out of poverty by 2025,” de Blasio spokeswoman Laura Feyer told the Journal.

De Blasio has boasted that the decrease in the poverty rate should be credited to signature policies such as universal pre-K and paid sick leave—policies that could help people save on child-care costs and avoid losing money each time they become sick—along with increases to the minimum wage.

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